Lu You (1125-1210), known as Wu Guan and known as Fang Weng, was an outstanding patriotic poet in my country. Throughout his life and his more than 9,000 poems, a strong spirit of patriotism was always permeated and permeated, thus forming the most significant feature of his poetry creation and establishing his lofty status in the poetry circle of his motherland. The poem "Shi'er" he wrote before his death is a deeply touching masterpiece that has been passed down through the ages:
When you die, you know that everything is in vain, but the sadness is not the same as in all nine states. Wang Shibei set the Central Plains Day, and he never forgot to tell Nai Weng about family sacrifices!
Translated into modern Chinese:
I originally knew that when I die, everything in this world will have nothing to do with me; but the only thing that makes me sad is that I can’t See with your own eyes the reunification of the motherland.
Therefore, when the day comes when the Song army regains the lost land in the Central Plains, and you hold family sacrifices, don’t forget to tell your father the good news!
This poem is Lu You's last work. When he was dying, he still could not forget the territory and people of the Central Plains occupied by the Jurchen nobles, and eagerly looked forward to the reunification of the motherland. Therefore, he specially wrote this poem as a will to earnestly warn his son. From here we can understand how persistent, deep, warm and sincere the poet's patriotic passion is! No wonder that since the Southern Song Dynasty, everyone who has read this poem has been moved by it. Especially when foreign enemies invaded or the motherland was divided, it aroused countless people's screams.
The era in which Lu You lived was an era in which ethnic conflicts were extremely acute in the history of our country. At the beginning of the 12th century, the Jurchen tribe in northeastern my country established the Jin Kingdom. In the second year after Lu You was born, the Jin State occupied Bianjing, the capital of the Northern Song Dynasty (today's Kaifeng City, Henan Province); in the third year, the two emperors Hui and Qin were captured, and the Northern Song Dynasty perished. When Qinzong's brother Zhao Gou fled to the south and established power in Lin'an (now Hangzhou, Zhejiang), instead of trying hard to regain the lost territory, he appointed the notorious traitor Qin Hui as prime minister, bent on bending his knees to the Jin people and suing for peace. . In the twelfth year of Shaoxing (1142), the peace treaty was concluded. Zhao Goujing was so shameless that he claimed to be a minister to the emperor of Jin, and promised to donate 250,000 taels of silver and 250,000 pieces of silk every year, and to draw the Huaihe River as a boundary with the Jin. From then on, the great rivers and mountains in the north became the territory of the Jin people, and the vast number of people in the north were enslaved by the Jin people. The small court of the Southern Song Dynasty only lived in a corner, lingering for years under the threat of the enemy. Later, the "Longxing Peace Agreement" signed by Song Xiaozong, Zhao Shen and Jin Dynasty and the "Kaixi Peace Agreement" signed by Ningzong Zhao Kuo and Jin Dynasty continued to humiliate themselves and seek peace. This situation is, of course, intolerable to the majority of the Han people who have always opposed national oppression. Therefore, in this historical era, countless outstanding sons and daughters of the Chinese nation stepped forward and launched an indomitable struggle, and Lu You was their outstanding representative on the literary front.
Lu You experienced the last years of the Northern Song Dynasty and the first half of the Southern Song Dynasty. Due to his hasty escape from the enemy invasion at a young age and the inspiration and education from the patriotic speeches of his family and relatives, Lu You had an extremely deep feeling for the serious national disaster at that time. Therefore, as early as his adolescence, he buried the desire for patriotic revenge deep in his heart. seed. From then on, whether he served as an official in the court or local areas, served in the army on the front lines of Sichuan and Shaanxi, or lived idle in his hometown in Shaoxing in his later years, this seed took root, sprouted, dried up, and blossomed. Although it was constantly ravaged by wind and rain, it continued to grow and strengthen. And it finally bears abundant fruits. There is a passage in the Qing Dynasty poet Zhao Yi's "Oubei Poetry", which is very summary. He said:
When Fang Weng was more than ten years old, he had already been accustomed to hearing the preface of Xianzheng, and he was as unchangeable as ice and fire. And in terms of the great meaning of "Spring and Autumn", there is nothing better than this, so I will keep it unchanged throughout my life. After entering Shu, under the curtain of Wang Yan, the Xuanfu envoy, he passed by Nanzheng and looked at Hu and Du. He was very ambitious and vigorous, and he really had the intention of throwing Yan and Yun at his fingertips. Five or six of his poems were restored. After leaving Shu, there were still three or four out of ten. After seventy years,... there is no ambition to regain fame. However, his "Reflections on Old Things in the Central Plains" says: "Begging for water in the East China Sea to wash away the sand", and "Lao Ma Xing" says: "The drought locusts in the Central Plains are in decline. When Wang Shi went to the Northern Expedition to pass on the imperial edict, he was very excited when he heard the war drums, "I hope I can bring peace to Yan and Zhao for the country." This is what I will never forget. Before his death, there is still a sentence: "Wang Shibei set the Central Plains Day, and the family sacrifices did not forget to tell the old man," which shows the original intention of letting the old man go.
Of course, the so-called "fifty-six out of ten" and "three-four out of ten" here are only rough statistics, and they are only based on quantity and surface. However, even here we can see Lu You's "plain ambition" "It is consistent, and it is unswerving from childhood to old age. In particular, this poem "Showing Children" is the patriotic spark that burst out at the end of his life. It can also be seen as a summary of his patriotic thoughts and poems throughout his life.
Literati throughout the ages who have read the poem "Shi'er" are all moved by it. As early as the Southern Song Dynasty, Liu Kezhuang had a quatrain that said:
It would be better to see the captives die than to let the old man Yi Qi be angry. Knowing that Xiao Lu was embarrassed, he decided to tell Master Wang to enter Luoyang!
This is after the Jin Dynasty was destroyed by the Mongols in 1234, and the Southern Song government dispatched troops from Huaixi to Kaifeng City, and then divided troops from Kaifeng to recapture Luoyang. When Liu was excited, he thought that Lu You's descendants must be He will obey his will and tell "Nai Weng" this good news. But the good times did not last long. The small court of the Southern Song Dynasty, which sang and danced in the mountains and had treacherous ministers in power, could not even resist the Jin soldiers who had become old and angry, let alone the Mongolian army of the "Fang Zhang Zhikou"? Thanks to the patriotic army and civilians who rose up to resist, this precarious regime continued for more than 40 years.
At this time, Lin Jingxi, a survivor of the Southern Song Dynasty, wrote a poem "After Reading Lu Fangweng's Poems". The meaning of the words is extremely sad. The last four sentences of the poem go like this:
The Qingshan Mountains are filled with sorrow and war, and the sky is filled with wars and wars in the south and east. When I came to my grandson, I saw him in Jiuzhou. How could I sue Naiweng for family sacrifices?
This means that when Lu You died, he regretted not seeing the "Jiuzhou Tong". Now his grandsons have seen this situation. However, it was not the Song Dynasty that unified China, but the emerging Yuan Empire. How should I tell the old man such news during the family ceremony? The two poems cited above, the former one is filled with the passion of "the book is full of joy and joy", and the latter one expresses the sorrow of "the sound of the country's subjugation is sad to think about", one is happy and the other is sad, both come from "Shi'er" Caused by poetry. Their patriotic enthusiasm is closely connected with Lu You.
As far as I can see, there are no fewer than thirty other commentators on Lu's poems who specifically mentioned the poem "Shi'er" (please refer to the "Compilation of Research Materials on Lu You" compiled by Comrade Kong Fanli and I) , or it may be said that it has the meaning of "Three Calls to Cross the River" in Zong's translation, or it may be said that it is the same as Du Fu's loyalty and patriotism of "never forgetting a meal". Some people sighed and cried after reading it, and some wrote poems to express their sympathy. This shows that this poem is sincere and touching!
However, most of the above people were infected by this poem and caused a stir, but they had no time to analyze its content in detail. One article worthy of reference and recommendation to readers is "Patriotic Poems" by contemporary Mr. Zhu Ziqing. In this article, he divided the patriotic poems in Chinese classical poetry into three items: first, loyalty to one dynasty, that is, loyalty to one surname; second, praising the soldiers who bravely killed the enemy; third, sympathies with foreigners. hatred. He also pointed out that the third item takes the nation as its standpoint and has a wider scope. He believed that Lu You "Although he was an official, his patriotic fervor was not only for the Zhao family. He served in the army in the northwest, which strengthened his hatred. For the sake of the nation and the country, he always had the ambition to restore the Central Plains." Therefore. Among the patriotic poems of the past dynasties, he particularly praised the poem "Shi'er" and made a detailed analysis of it:
The poem "Shi'er" was written before his death. He did not talk about anything else but Saying "Beijing set the Central Plains" was his specialty. This kind of poem only speaks to his son, not some left-over expression. There is no need to be pretentious. He can say other words to express himself; but he only said this, because he thought it was the most expressive thing to say to him. The poem says, "Yuan knows that all things are empty", and everything can be put aside; "But the sorrow is not the same as that of all nine states", only this one thing cannot be put aside. Although he said he was "dead" and "no longer see his colleagues in Kyushu", he still believed that "Master Wang" would eventually "set the Central Plains in the north", so he told his son to "don't forget to report family sacrifices to Nai Weng"! Teach your son to "never forget" and realize that he never "forgets" his own thoughts. This was the idealization of his patriotic fervor; this ideal was the prototype of what we now call the belief that "nation comes first." ...Among the poets of the past, perhaps he is the only one worthy of being called a patriotic poet. (See "Selected Works of Zhu Ziqing", Kaiming Bookstore Edition in 1952)
Zhu Ziqing himself is also an affectionate patriot. He is good at writing both new and old poems, so his analysis of Lu You and his poems is profound. With a wise mind. He saw Lu You's "idealization of patriotic enthusiasm" from the poem "Shi'er", in other words, the progress of Lu You's patriotic thought and the height it reached. Regarding this point, we can further explain and add: First, Lu You's love for the motherland is closely integrated with his love for the people, including his deep memory for the "remnants" of the Central Plains who "endured to recover", It also includes sympathy and sympathy for the people of the Southern Song Dynasty who "lost gold coins to Hu Qiang every year." The second is his attachment to the great rivers and mountains in the north that are inseparable from the motherland, such as the "Yellow River of thirty thousand miles" and the "Taihua of five thousand ren", as well as the "palaces of the two capitals" and so on. Furthermore, he cherishes the national language and the entire national culture, fearing that it will be destroyed and assimilated under the long-term rule of foreigners, so that "the children of Dongdu speak nonsense", and even the entire second generation "Yang Qiu Zuo Qi Ren", changing They have lost the living habits of the Han people and forgotten the traditions of their ancestors (for details, see Chapter 4 of Part II of my book "The Biography of Lu You" for details). These are the main reasons why he is "sad but unable to see the same people in all nine states" and eagerly looks forward to the "Beijing Central Plains Day". They are also the fundamental content of his patriotic thoughts. Lenin said: "Patriotism is the deepest feeling for one's motherland that has been consolidated over thousands of years." This includes love for hometown, motherland, one's own people, and excellent traditions. These are the thoughts and feelings expressed in Lu You's poems. Therefore, Zhu Wen claimed: "Among the poets in the past, he may be the only one worthy of being called a patriotic poet." Although this evaluation seems too emphatic and seems to be obliterating others, in order to point out the characteristics, we should admit that it is very pertinent and fair.
"Shier's Poems" is a precious cultural heritage of the Chinese nation. Today, although it has been seven or eight hundred years since Lu You wrote his "Shi'er Poetry", the patriotic fervor expressed in the poem is still tear-jerking and thought-provoking. "When a bird is about to die, its song is mournful; when a man is about to die, his words are also kind.
"The mournful sound of "But it is sad that all nine states are the same" in this poem is still a powerful call for the reunification of the motherland and the return of identity!